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Daytona State to Buy News-Journal Center, Replacing Theater

Daytona Beach News-Journal Center

I just read read that Daytona State College is buying the Daytona Beach News-Journal Center.

Have you seen the newspaper’s huge building at 221 North Beach Street, near International Speedway Boulevard, pictured above? The college is buying that. The Foundation, the philanthropic wing of Daytona State, is spending $2.6 million to pay off the terrible debt the Journal owes.

Even now, the building is not for the newspaper’s production; it’s a theater and “cultural community center.” The DSC foundation president, William Olivari, made this statement to the press:

With the college getting ready for a renovation of its own arts center, we thought this would be a great addition, since it’s (the News Journal Center) a new building, and we can use the land under the (college’s) center for new classrooms rather than spend millions in renovating.”

So they’re going to convert the Theater Center to classroom space on the campus, and then use the News-Journal building as the college theater.

My concern is the travel distance. Right now, the theater is conveniently at the Daytona Beach campus. How far away is the News-Journal Center? I wanted to know, so I looked it up on MapQuest. It’s 2.92 miles. Moving something as essential as the theater miles off-campus doesn’t seem right to me.

Kent Sharples has been talking to the Daytona Beach commissioners this week to get them to transfer the land the building rests on to the college. The land is leased from the state of Florida to the city of Daytona Beach to the News-Journal, so there are many layers of bureaucracy. The red tape will take a while to cut through. Daytona Beach appears to be paying a token sum of $1 per year for the land, so the college may not be paying a lot for the acquisition. The News-Journal quotes the transfer as a “gift agreement.” I’m sure it won’t cost 2.6 million dollars to the college, though. This will find some way to cost at least $5M.

It’s going to be more work for DSC to own the News-Journal center outright; it has to appear before the state legislature in March of 2009. So the plan is to lease it in the interim. Eventually, the name will be changed to “The News-Journal Center at Daytona State College” if possible. The new website will be thenews-journalcenteratdaytonastate.com. Nah, just kidding about the last part. :cool:

Still, I wonder how this will affect the college. This positions the theater as an entirely separate branch of the college, by placing such distance between them, and will impede non-theater students who casually visit. Still, the new building is much more impressive, so the college will be able to put on more grandiose and culturally enriching performances. I’ll be tracking the progress of the transfer over the next weeks and months.

This is a bad photo

DSC ugly title photo

Am I the only one who thinks this photo on the Daytona State College home page is ugly? She’s a pretty lady with a nice smile, but she’s squinting. Not even that makes the photo bad, though. The terrible JPEG artifacts around her eyes make it ugly. Why would they do this? There’s no reason for visible artifacts. Did they compress this 8 times in a row or something? At 27KB, the file size isn’t even small for the image’s size and algorithmic complexity. There’s no reason for it to look like this.

If you’ve seen daytonastate.edu anytime recently, you’ve noticed that the home page randomly displays one of three photos of students. The other two are fine. This one needs to go; or they need to go back to the source file and save a clean copy.

I’m surprised “YourSpace” is one word. Is Daytona State competing with MySpace? I can only wonder why a college with such wonderful English professors doesn’t use proper English on its home page.

The Spring 2008 Awards

I was happy to cover photography for the college’s spring awards ceremony on April 16. Some of the highlights:

Kent Sharples hands out awards

Kent Sharples, the DSC president, preparing to hand out one of many awards.

DSC faculty applauds

An applauding faculty member in the audience.

The QUANTA gang

The QUANTA gang says hello. QUANTA is a community for a collection of core subjects at building 300 in the fall and spring at the college; it’s one of the premier learning communities in academia. I had a lot of fun studying and making friends their over the 2007-2008 year, and recommend it to any prospective students. Read my story here. A great book we traditionally read at the end of the spring semester is Seven Life Lessons of Chaos. Brilliant stuff; you won’t find this level of reflection and personal development in any normal class. Their motto is “don’t think either/or—think both and,” which is a welcome departure from the typical rigid mindset you find in the classroom.

It’s funny looking back, because Kent was so happy to announce that he knew the name Daytona Beach College was about to be approved, and already it’s Daytona State College.

I shot all these on black and white 35mm film, but am looking forward to shooting the next ceremony with my excellent Canon Rebel XTi and EF 50mm 1:1.4 lens. No one is camera-shy at the college, likely because of the prestigious photography presence. Unfortunately a lot of the photography department’s links are broken at the moment, but there’s some good info on that page.

The State of the Name

Daytona State College’s name has been all over the place. In October of 2007, the school stripped “Community” from its name, becoming Daytona Beach College instead of Daytona Beach Community College. Then on 2008 June 20, a press release was posted to the website announcing the new name as Daytona State College. I passed the college on International Speedway Blvd. on 2008 July 14, and this is what I saw:

New Sign for Daytona State College

However, there are signs all around the campus still saying DBCC or DBC. Even the enrollment banner above the DSC sign still has the old name and website. It must be awfully confusing to visitors or prospective students.

The state of the domain name is even worse. The name has been lengthened to daytonastate.edu, even though early announcements said DSC had procured dsc.edu. All of the faculty and student email addresses are going through another change. My address is the incredibly lengthy richard_thripp@falconmail.daytonastate.edu.

As for the old addresses, DSC’s performance has been abysmal. dbcc.edu was redirecting to dbc.edu a week ago, but now goes nowhere. dbc.edu and daytonastate.edu are currently existing in parallel, and there are links to different domains all over the place. Many links are broken. Hasn’t DSC every heard of HTTP 301 redirects? When I changed richardxthripp.com to thripp.com two weeks ago, I had no problems using them to redirect every page over to the new address. You’d think their sysadmins could do that.

All falconmail.dbcc.edu email addresses are irrevocably broken. I just received this email from the college on the 14th:

Dear Daytona State Student:

Name Change: You may have heard the college Trustees voted to change our name to Daytona State College. Our new name will allow us to build upon the core mission and values that have been central to the college for more than 50 years, while expanding into affordable baccalaureate degree programs. We look to the future for new ways to provide opportunities to our students and to help foster economic development, culture and quality of life in the communities we serve.

Email Address Change: You may have noticed that your FalconMail address has been updated to be first_last@ falconmail.dbc.edu. As of Monday, July 14th, please start using your address as first_last@ falconmail.DaytonaState.edu. If you experience difficulties, your dbc.edu account will work for two additional weeks.

Please note: As of July 11, 2008 the dbcc.edu address will no longer be valid and no mail will be delivered.

Email address for staff will also be changing to the DaytonaState.edu, please review the college website for more information.

To reach the enrollment services offices, you can email:

Admissions@DaytonaState.edu
Advising@DaytonaState.edu
Assessment@DaytonaState.edu
Financial Aid@DaytonaState.edu
Registration@DaytonaSate.edu
Records@DaytonaState.edu
StudentAccounts@DaytonaState.edu

Thank you. If you have any questions about the use of FalconMail you can contact the Helpdesk at helpdesk@dbc.edu.

So apparently, I’ve got 8 days to tell everyone about my new address before richard_thripp@falconmail.dbc.edu breaks. Why can’t every email address and domain work forever? It isn’t that hard to set up.

WCEU Channel 15 is supposed to become WDSC eventually. Their website still says Daytona Beach College, and their programming is just as bad. Some shows say DBCC, some DBC, and probably DSC by now if I was still watching.

I hope they’re sticking with Daytona State College and daytonastate.edu now.

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